A river ripper's trip around the world.

No wind on Maui…

The last two weeks have been some kind of a wake-up call for me, as I had grown accustom to the never-ending wind and waves here on Maui. Yeah, it’s been at least two weeks since any real wind here on the north shore. Last Friday I managed to catch a few waves at Kanaha, but the wind was so light it was irritating, and usually I’m not one to complain during light wave-sailing. When the wave is powerful enough, you only need a light breeze (8-10 knots would be a reasonable minimum, but I have made attempts, some successful, in even lighter winds) to shlog out and get passed the breaking waves. Once you are on a wave, you don’t need the wind to move anymore. What I did learn, is that you still need it to turn though. In the surf, having the sail can be seen as both a handicap and an advantage. It gives the rider extra power in the turns, and opens up a whole new range of possibilities in terms of aerials, but it also makes the turns naturally wider and less vertical. Some riders are able to compensate that by engaging themselves thoroughly in both the top and the bottom turn, but by nature windsurfing is less dynamic on the wave than pure surfing. The challenge is to be as radical, as vertical and as powerful as surfers by going as fast as possible and pushing the turns as hard as possible.

Instead of wind though, the north shore of Maui has received, last week, one of the biggest swells in a few decades. This resulted in some very epic action at Peahi, but also in some really fun, challenging conditions at other beaches, like Paia Bay, where I’ve been surfing pretty much every day for the last week. Surfing is very different from windsurfing, and at the same time so close. One of the biggest challenges for me is definitely to learn to be patient. You can’t just start paddling on anything that looks somehow like a wave, you need to wait for the right one, and that is something I am not used to. The extra mobility we have with windsurfing makes us feel almost as if we’re on a conveyor belt, taking one wave after the other, with almost no pause in between. Anyways, the perspective of surfing is without a doubt really interesting, and I’m stoked that I am actually making some progress, hopefully I’ll have something worthy of putting on video to share with everyone soon!